In January, two members of my Social Justice group and I met with the founder of SAFER organization, activist and speaker Marybeth Seitz Brown.

SAFER is an organization that empowers students to hold their universities accountable for having strong campus sexual assault policies and programming. They hold workshops and seminars on the dangers of campus rape, the rules that every college should have and enforce as well as informing young people on the topic.

We previously met Marybeth briefly at a lecture that we attended at NYU where she was a speaker.

We met at a coffee shop by her office to conduct an interview. We spoke about many different ideas surrounding our topic. One idea that we touched on was simply how to take action on stopping rape and preventing it before it happens. She informed us that there are many ways but simply just spreading the word to people around us and giving this social justice issue more recognition. We also talked about different theories that she had touched on in the previous lecture. This being teaching children when they are young in different ways to respect one another and introducing the ideas of affirmative consent. By telling a child to ask before they hug someone is a start and it is proven that methods like this have a huge impact on who they will be when they are older and are dealing with bigger choices. We ended our conversation talking about what Marybeth herself does with SAFER and she told us about the different colleges that they go to and what kind of lessons they teach.

This Interview with Marybeth was such an amazing experience and her opinions are so different from any of the other activists we had met.